2. Jakob
JAKOB
Idrop the Remington.
The stock cracks against the porch planks and the sound doesn't register because my hands are already moving, reaching forward, grabbing fistfuls of wet fabric and the body inside it before her skull splits open on the door.
She's mid-collapse, legs folding under her like a deer hit at the tree line, and I get one hand behind her head and the other under her arm and haul her into me in a motion that's pure reflex.
Twelve years of catching wounded men behind cover. Muscle memory doesn't ask permission.
That's the first coherent thought. She weighs absolutely nothing, and she's soaking wet, and she's so cold that the shock of her skin against my forearm registers like grabbing a handful of creek ice in January.
The rain has saturated every layer she's wearing, this ridiculous pastel coat that's about as useful as tissue paper up here, some thin shirt underneath it, and the cold has gone all the way through her into the bone.
I can feel it radiating off her. Not shivering anymore.
That's bad. When the shivering stops is when things go sideways.
I pull her fully across the threshold and kick the door shut with my heel.
The wind catches it and I have to kick harder, driving my boot back until the latch catches and the howl of the storm drops to a muffled roar behind three inches of oak.
The fire in the main room throws long shadows across the floor and in that light I get my first real look at what the mountain just dropped on my doorstep.
Small. That's the word that keeps circling.
She's small in a way I'm not used to, a way that has nothing to do with height alone, though she's short enough that the top of her head barely clears my shoulder.
Small in her wrists, which are bird-boned and white under the mud.
Small in her waist where my hand almost spans the entire width of her side through the soaked coat.
Small in her face, which is slack and colorless, her lips carrying a blue tinge that puts a hard knot of something ugly in my gut.
I don't know this woman. Don't know her name, don't know how she got up my road, don't know why in the living hell she's standing on my porch at eleven at night in the worst storm this ridge has seen since March.
My road isn't on any map. I made sure of that.
Pulled the old forest service signs myself, let the brush grow over the turnoff, never registered the address with the county.
You don't find this place unless you're lost beyond recovery or you're looking for trouble, and either way you're not someone I want on my property.
But she's dying. That's not an exaggeration, not drama.
I've seen hypothermia take men twice her size in half this amount of exposure time.
Stage two, maybe pushing stage three. The shivering cessation, the loss of consciousness, the blue lips.
Her core temperature is somewhere it shouldn't be and every minute she stays in these wet clothes is a minute closer to cardiac arrest.
We go to the fire. Not gently, because gentle takes time and time is the thing she doesn't have.
I cross the main room in four strides and lower her onto the braided rug in front of the woodstove, positioning her on her side the way the field medics taught us, airway clear, neck neutral.
Her hair falls across her face in dark, wet ropes and I push it back with fingers that leave mud streaks on her temple.
Her skin is waxy under my touch. Cold and smooth and wrong.
The ruined pastries are still scattered across my doorway. Croissants. She brought croissants up a mountain in a rainstorm.
I strip the coat off her. Buttons first, four of them, my fingers too thick for the dainty clasps so I just rip them through the buttonholes and peel the fabric back.
Underneath she's wearing a thin cotton shirt, white, now transparent and plastered to skin that's mottled with cold.
I pull that over her head too, rolling her carefully, keeping her head supported the way you support something breakable.
Her jeans are next, stiff with mud and water, and I have to work them down her hips and legs with both hands, cursing under my breath the whole time because they cling to her like a second skin and she's dead weight and floppy and her feet are still in these useless ankle boots with no tread and no insulation and no goddamn business being within fifty miles of this elevation.
She's in her underwear on my floor and I'm not looking.
I'm pulling the wool blanket off the back of the couch and wrapping her in it, then reaching for the second one, the heavy Hudson Bay I keep by the woodstove for nights when the generator dies.
I layer both blankets over her and open the stove door to feed the fire, shoving in two split rounds of Douglas fir and adjusting the damper until the flames roar and the heat pushes outward in waves.
Then I kneel beside her and press two fingers to the side of her throat. Her pulse flutters against my fingertips. Faint and fast and irregular.
I need to get her core temperature up. Not the skin, the core.
Warming the outside too fast pushes cold blood back to the heart and that's how people die on the rescue table instead of in the snow.
I learned that in a frozen ditch outside Kandahar with a private named Welch whose lips looked exactly the shade of blue hers do right now, and Welch didn't make it, and I am not thinking about Welch.
I fill the kettle from the hand pump at the sink and set it on the woodstove's flat top.
Grab two Nalgene bottles from the shelf above the kitchen counter and line them up.
When the water's hot but not boiling, not hot enough to burn skin that can't feel the damage, I'll fill those bottles and tuck them against her armpits, her groin, the places where the blood runs closest to the surface.
Field rewarming. Low tech. Effective if you do it right and you don't panic and you don't stop paying attention.
I check her pulse again. Still thready but there.
Still fighting. I pull the blankets tighter around her and notice my hands are shaking.
Not from cold. I haven't been cold in years.
My body runs hot, always has, and the home sits at a steady sixty-eight with the stove burning, which is more than warm enough for a man carrying two hundred and forty pounds of muscle and scar tissue.
My hands are shaking because I'm angry and the anger has nowhere to go.
Angry at her for being up here. Angry at whatever GPS or booking service or cosmic bureaucratic error funneled a woman in a pastel trench coat up an unregistered logging road in November.
Angry at myself for the specific pitch of my heartbeat when I look at the blue in her lips.
I stand and pace back to the door. The Remington's still on the planks getting rained on and that's a sin against a good firearm that I'll deal with later.
Right now the doorway is where I find the wreckage of what she was carrying.
The box is on its side, lid torn open, mud and rain pooling inside.
I pick it up with one hand and bring it inside, shutting the door again with my shoulder.
The box is from someplace called La Petite Boulangerie.
The lettering is gold on cream cardstock, mostly dissolved now, and inside there are six croissants and four of those fancy tart things with the fruit on top, all of it crushed and soaked and muddy and completely ruined.
She carried this. Up that road. In the dark.
In a storm that would've given a seasoned hiker second thoughts.
She carried pastries up a mountain like she was going to a dinner party, like she was showing up to someone's house and wanted to make a good first impression.
Sharp. Specific. Like a blade tip finding the gap between ribs.
I place the box on the kitchen counter and stand there staring at it longer than I should.
The tarts are unsalvageable. The croissants are compressed into dough wads.
She packed these for someone. Picked them out, probably stood in a bakery somewhere at the base of the mountain and pointed at the display case and said something cheerful and unnecessary to the person behind the counter because she strikes me as exactly that kind of woman, the kind who chats with cashiers and tips too much and smiles at strangers who don't deserve it.
Something catches in my neck and I swallow it down hard.
I return to her. She hasn't moved. Her breathing has shifted, though, a marginal improvement, deeper and slower, the blankets rising and falling in a rhythm that looks less like her body is fighting to stay alive and more like sleep.
Just sleep. I crouch beside her and pull back to check her hands.
Her fingers are curled loosely against her collarbone.
The nails are painted some soft color I can't identify in the firelight.
Pink, maybe. Or peach. Something that belongs in a magazine, not on a mountainside.
The kettle starts to hiss. I fill both Nalgenes, wrap them in a flannel shirt from the hook by the door, and work them carefully under the blankets.
One against her left side, tucked into the hollow of her armpit.
The other against her inner thigh where the femoral artery pulses close to the surface.
She flinches at the contact, a full-body jolt, and a sound comes out of her that's half whimper and half something else, confused and animal and afraid, and my hand freezes on the bottle until she settles again, her body curling instinctively around the warmth.